Dear Jane,

I am a mother. SO. I know: I was not the girl a mother dreams of for her son.

I hope my Southern good manners will stretch to cover my worry should Sam one day bring home a tatty, googley-eyed, egocentric, mouthy object with a questionable sense of humor, especially if she is prone to fits of Irish temper and zoning out into imaginary universes in the middle of conversations. Let’s throw in un-domestic, undisciplined, unreasonable, unthoughtful, and with no clear grounding in sp...